


All colours but the light.

by reiicharu



Category: Arashi (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Former Relationships, M/M, Modelling, Photographer and Model, Photography
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-03
Updated: 2014-09-03
Packaged: 2018-02-15 23:53:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2248062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reiicharu/pseuds/reiicharu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He looks at Nino the same way, behind the lens and without one. Nino looks at him differently, from the day they met, how Jun asks him to look, right up until now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All colours but the light.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally, I wrote this for Nino Exchange but then it just became something else. I think back then, I had this whole backstory of how Jun and Nino got started in the industry, their years together, but I never got around to that and instead, I guess this is what would have been an epilogue to that story.

They meet again in Hong Kong. 

Nino’s looking into the camera as though it’s someone he knows. Jun’s behind the lens, looking through it as though he wants to see anything else. 

Afterwards, they sit on a ferry and look at the lights across the water.

It’s been five years. 

Nino won’t look at him and as they depart from the docks to their separate ways, Jun has to curl his fingers into his hands, just so that he won’t reach out. 

 

 

He calls Nino when he returns to his hotel room.

Nino picks up.

Jun doesn’t know what to say.

Instead, the silence speaks for them.

 

 

When they started, Jun remembers that Nino was stiff and uneasy. Staring right into the lens as though it’s a foreign object that might eject a punching glove into his face.

Jun looked up from the viewfinder, making a displeased noise.

Nino was covered in feathers, in silver fabric, in something structured and flowing all in one. Jun thought it was an interesting balance and so did his lecturers. Nino thought otherwise. 

“I look like a circus performer.”

“Can you at least look at though you aren’t walking over knife blades?”

“These shoes are ridiculous,” Nino snapped, pointing down at shoes that look more like hoofs. 

“They’re an homage.”

“To what, terrible life choices?” 

Jun rolled his eyes, “Alexander McQueen. Close your eyes, jump around.”

“Who the hell can jump in these shoes?”

 

 

Go back, go back as far back as you can remember:

“Hey.”

He was walking to the train station. One lone thin figure that cut through a crowd without care for those around him, a weight on him and eyes that seemed to see more. 

“Hey!”

 

 

They meet at a tiny coffee shop in Kowloon. Nino’s digging into a bowl of noodles when Jun arrives and he’s not at all apologetic. 

“I haven’t eaten all day. I did this shoot after yours, with this complete asshat who thought it’d be a great idea to drench me from head to toe,” Nino snorts. 

There’s two cups of coffee, one black and another with condensed milk.

Jun reaches for the cup of black. Nino pushes the sugar across the table. 

“So, were you too busy being drenched or you were too concerned as to whether your stomach will show?” Jun jokes and Nino grunts and it gets a laugh out of Jun. “Really? You?”

“My vanity has taken great leaps since the last time we met,” Nino replies solemnly.

Jun dumps the sugar into his coffee and stirs it through. It’s still quite hot and he wraps his hands around the mug. 

“I haven’t seen you since—”

“You threw your design book at my face,” Nino replies dryly, “Trust me. I remember that very vividly.”

“To my defence, I didn’t throw it very hard.” 

“I kept it, you know.”

 

 

Jun used to take his coffee straight, but on the worse days, the ones where nothing seems to go right, he over sugars it. 

Sometime in between art deco and Moulin Rouge, Nino yanks off the ridiculous jacket with its military buttons and epaulettes and takes the coffee cup from Jun’s hands. 

“I’ll be so glad when you’re done with this part of your portfolio,” Nino complains, as he always does. “I look like a deformed marionette from a 1980s toy shop display window.” 

Nino always has something to say about the clothes. Last week, Jun put him a suit and Nino complained that the trousers were tapered down too much, that his ankles showing and, “Why is the suit pink?”

“Pastels,” Jun had corrected, “It’s a pastel.”

“Pink, pastel, why can’t it be black?”

Nino blows on the coffee, takes a sip and makes a face.

“What, you hate my coffee as well?” Jun snorts and Nino ignored him in favour of going through the photos on the computer screen next to them. “You’re getting better at this, you know.”

“Well, I’m amazingly talented for someone you picked up on the street.” 

 

 

Jun’s first ever dress was for his sister. It was because she had a ballet recital. Their father was busy working and their mother didn’t know what else to do. Jun bought ribbons and cut on silvers from blue felt and stuck them and the ribbons on his sister’s leotard for her performance. Never mind that she was meant to play a Christmas elf of some sort, but he thought he did a pretty good job.

In all technicalities, he didn’t make the actual leotard. He was seven at the time and very proud of himself. 

 

 

“Do you want it back?” Nino asks him abruptly, “Your sketchbook. If you’re not busy sometime soon, I can give it back to you.”

“It’s not really much use to me anymore,” which is true. Jun hasn’t sketched in years. He hasn’t torn fabric apart and stitched it together. He threw out his mannequin when he left for New York. His sewing machine and interlocker were given to his mother. The sketchbook, he thought he might have kept. Instead, it ended up in Nino’s face. “Did you look through it?”

“It’s me, of course I did.” 

Nino used to always try to go through the sketchbook. He’d try to see Jun’s older designs back then, tried to steal it out of his bag or grab it out of Jun’s hands. They used to struggle like school kids, laughing stupidly and sometimes rolled around on the studio floor. 

Sometimes, Nino would kiss him and yank the book out of his hands and go running off.

They wouldn’t get much done on those days.

 

 

Just look at the camera as though it’s someone you know, he says to Nino. Just like you know them and you don’t like them. 

Why, Nino asked him.

 

 

He doesn’t know when he realised that he wouldn’t be enough, that he’s a carbon outline of designers he loves and clothes he wants to wear.

At first, it was just disappointment and confusion and wanting to scream at the universe.

“Your photographs,” his co-ordinator told him, “They’re what sells your clothes to me. We can put in a transfer.”

“I don’t want to take photographs.”

I just wanted to look at the model. 

 

 

Nino always takes his coffee with milk, “Weak stomach,” and besides, he prefers bottled tea from the vending machines. 

On hot days, it’s long blacks over ice for Jun and more vending machine tea for Nino. 

 

 

“Hey,” he said. The guy grabbed him by the arm as they stood in the middle of an intersection and Nino yanked his arm away. “I need you.”

“Sorry, I don’t do that sort of thing.”

 

 

“There’s absolutely no one else like you,” Nino informs, “You’re stubborn and talented and really annoying. And you’ve got a weird colour palette but I won’t hold that against you.”

“So why do you keep coming back?” Jun asks.

“Maybe I like your weird colour palette.”

 

 

They walk down the street that night, down to the subway and Nino’s train is before his. 

They’ve put him up in some ritzy hotel in Central. The room service is free, Nino says and it’s almost an invitation.

When he gets on the train, he looks back, looks at Jun.

As though Jun is someone he once knew. 

 

 

Jun stops making clothes when he works with Nylon, when he graduates from steaming clothes and running prints to actually handling lighting, to submitting portfolios. His clothes get folded and stored away. It doesn’t matter if they’re creased.

He lets Nino keep a suit, that’s tapered at the legs and into the waist.

The buttons are silver and the fabric is ink.

After that, Nino stands in front of cameras that put him into Vogue.

 

 

 

In Hong Kong, Jun stops girls on streets and boys brushing by him. 

He takes instant pictures and with his digital, he thanks them and some of them ask who he is.

“I work with a few magazines,” he’ll say.

He could say that he’s a big deal, but Jun wants to keep the distance where it is.

It wouldn’t work out any other way.

He sends the images to his editor who tells him you need one more, just finish it up. Then come home and let’s get this show going.

He calls Nino one more time, “Are you free?”

“Are you paying?”

 

 

The first time he dressed Nino, it was in a shirt made of muslin. Nino stubbornly kept on his jeans, pushed out of his comfort zone and onto a park bench as people stared at Jun with a camera.

Jun doesn’t quite remember what it was for.

All he remembers is that he worked hard to make Nino laugh, because any other look and Nino looked alone, miserable, lost.

He looked how Jun felt.

No one would want to see that. 

 

 

On the ferry, Nino sits on the bench behind him and Jun turns and puts a camera on him.

 

 

Jun holds an exhibition in Tokyo.

It’s his third one, but this one is different. 

It’s about strangers, Jun says.

They say it’s his best yet. It’s personal, it’s real, it’s heartbreaking.

There’s photographs of Nino. They’re at the back of the gallery, near the exit as people leave.

It’s the last thing they see, one large canvas with Nino looking at the camera as though it’s someone he knows.

 

 

“Look at the camera,” Jun tells him, just as he’s done a hundred times before.

“How?”

“As though it’s someone you know.”

As though it’s someone you loved.

 

 

Strangers, Jun says in his statement. Just as though you knew them once, and then they fade away.


End file.
